As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. It was certainly the motivation behind the creation of the service. The three founders of the company all have different backgrounds, though all related to web and IT, but we all had the same issue at some point. We could not find a good way to make sure our web projects worked correctly for all of our users. Invariably, we would forget to test IE6 or Safari on the Mac or something. We hate it when customers find our bugs.
Being technically oriented, we were usually trying out new interactive technologies like jquery and different UI libraries that relied on AJAX and were usually having trouble with them. While there were plenty of screenshot services out there, no one seemed to be offering a way for us to interactively test the functionality of our projects. In true geek fashion, we just started building our own.
The first release was the live testing service via an embedded VNC client. When we found ourselves using it daily, we knew we had something. Then we started getting feedback from our users telling us how much time it saved them as well as money since they didn’t have to maintain their own testing environment. Then we added Macs into the mix as well as the screenshot service both of which were well received.
One of the coolest features we added was the new bookmarklet which really streamlines your work-flow and makes the service a breeze to use. What is even cooler about it is that it was inspired by a comment from one of our customers.
The business is growing faster than we could have imagined. We are trying to implement all of the features we have planned for the service as well as integrate suggestions from our users. We think we offer a good value for the money, but we are just getting started. We have much more in the works and we hope you’ll stick around and see how it all works out.
If you’ve left us feedback or contacted us, you know that we respond to all of it and that it isn’t just a form letter. That is another thing we put a lot of effort into, communication. Honestly, that keeps us pretty busy in itself. It is something we think is pretty important and something that we think sets us a little bit apart from other services. We hate it when we get bad service from a company that we are giving our dollars to and we think you probably do too.
Ken, Tony, and Mike
